coronavirus

COVID Deaths & High Urban Population Densities (October 5 Update)

Wendell Cox — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 15:08:23 -0400

The Figures below provide an update through October 5, 2020 to the relationship between county urban densities and COVID-19 death rates. The data continues to show a strong association between higher urban densities and death rates. The analysis approach and method are described in “Perspective: US Covid-19 Deaths and Urban Population Density.” See: Figure 1: “COVID-19 Death Rates by County Urban Density Category” and Figure 2: “Deaths Proportionate to Population” and Figure 3: “COVID-19 Death Rates by Urban Density.”

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.
Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Relearning the lessons of 1919 in 2020

Steven Lamb — Sun, 05 Apr 2020 15:24:08 -0400

More than 100 years ago, a worldwide pandemic moved from China to the entire Western World through in-sourced low wage labor, according to the research of one historian. As the Allies fought WWI, farmers were going to war, and as Napoleon said, “An army marches on its stomach.”

The Allies desperately needed chicken and pig farmers to raise food to be canned for the troops. Some 96,000 Northern Chinese farmers and menial laborers were imported. Everywhere they went a killing flu broke out and then made its way through human contact around most of the globe killing many more people (50 million) than the war casualties of WWI. The German, Austrian and Turkish populations were particularly hard hit, and the so-called “Spanish Flu” played no small part in the end of the war. The first lesson is that borders need to be medically controlled and that closed borders are safer than open ones, especially when there are wildly varying sanitary and health conditions between nations.

The Spanish Influenza was so named because, to most people, it seemed Spain was most heavily hit by the virus. This wasn’t actually true, but because Spain was neutral, it seemed hardest hit due to the fact that its press was not being censored for the war effort. People in the nations fighting the war were not given information about the disease, how it was spread and how to avoid exposure. They would still go to munitions factories and bond rallies, remaining focused on war activities. This allowed the virus to deeply penetrate all of Europe and the United States. The second lesson is that a controlled or dishonest press is an agent of death in a pandemic.

Most of the Spanish flu victims didn’t actually die from the virus. The virus would ravage their bodies, particularly their lungs. Generally, they would recover but be terribly weakened, their lungs etched by the effects of the virus. In their weakened state, the victims acquired bacterial infections. With raw lungs and weakened immune systems, they were unable to withstand the infections.

This led to a cleanliness and anti-bacterial fetish in the Western World from 1920 until roughly 1980. By 1980, we had forgotten the WHY of this fetish and deemed it to be the silliness and unjustified paranoia of our grandparents’ generation. They had no 15-second rule on their fastidiously clean floors for very good reason. The third major lesson is that soap and other disinfectants save lives.

I had not flown on a jet from 1989 until 2016. I had not taken a bus, streetcar or train from 1990 until 2017. As a member of a national not-for-profit board, I have recently been taking public transportation to get around the country. The shabbiness and filth on jets, trains and buses I encountered was shocking.

Presumably as a cost-cutting measure, general filth has been allowed to prevail. This makes public transportation dangerous, in addition to the crowding of people into tight, poorly ventilated space. In the 1918 pandemic, it was noticed that people who used public transportation had much higher infection rates than those who walked, rode bicycles or used automobiles. The fourth lesson is the same today. Mass transit is dangerous during epidemics and pandemics.

Beginning in 1920, there was a huge move of population in the industrialized world from cramped cities to the suburbs. Again the Spanish flu played a major role in Modernist-Progressive preaching that the cramped conditions of cities made them natural breeding grounds for disease. The first train subway founded in Connecticut in the 1880s gave support to this thinking.

Los Angeles County, famous for being an “automotive metropolis,” was actually laid out in the 1890s as suburbs. The thought process was that even if fathers of families had to risk their lives by working in the city, wives and children would be safe from contagion and also able to exercise and grow some family food. It was seen in the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak that, indeed, tightly packed dense cities had almost double the infection rates as suburbs and rural areas. The fifth lesson in 1918 was clear, as it should be clear today: density kills.

For two decades now, Globalists pretending to be Progressives and falsely flying under our banner have been attempting to remake the world into a global community of open borders, reduced standards of cleanliness and maintenance, lower wages, mass transit and dense urban cores. They have refused the lessons of history that 1918 and all other world pandemics and local health crises have taught us.

At this very moment, as a pandemic rages, the Globalists still demand and promote bail-out packages with open borders, dense and killing mass transit systems, anti-suburban planning initiatives and, insanely enough, more dense cities. Their religion of oligarch profit will not consider reality, instead wanting to enforce an obstinate rigidity against it.

The future is ours. We must seize it for the reality history shows what real sustainability is.

Steven Lamb is a 4th generation Native Californian. He is a past City Council Person and Land Use Commissioner. Mr. Lamb has had a Organic Architecture design practice for thirty five years. Mr. Lamb presently is a board member of Progressives for Immigration Reform and a co founder of the Center for Progressive Urban Politics.

Urban Life and Pandemics

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 22 Mar 2020 12:02:11 -0400

Pandemics have always been the enemy of dense, urban life. Cities, where people live in close quarters and mix with people from other places, are ideal breeding grounds for contagions. So far, by contrast, there have been comparatively few coronavirus infections in the vast middle of the United States, particularly in the rural reaches. When the bubonic plague devastated Europe, as the historian William McNeill noted, the cosmopolitan centers of Renaissance Italy fared far worse than the reaches of Poland or other parts of Central Europe. Those grandees who could, like some contemporary wealthy New Yorkers, fled to their country homes, where the chance of infection was slighter.

Even before covid-19 hit, large urban centers like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago were losing population; more than 90 percent of all population growth since 2010 has taken place in the suburbs or exurbs. Millennials, as a new study from Heartland Forward demonstrates, based on an analysis of census numbers, increasingly head to cities and towns in the middle of the country and away from the supposed “magnets” of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

The current pestilence is likely to accelerate those shifts, which bear major ramifications for how Americans get to work. Transit ridership was doing poorly before the crisis, declining throughout the country, while telecommuting and driving alone continue to grow. With the specter of contagion, city-dwellers are told to avoid crowded subways, removing a critical element that makes ultradense cities work. In New York, subway traffic is down precipitously, as many commuters now work at home instead. Toronto is eliminating much of its downtown train service. The Washington Metro is also cutting back.

Just as progressives and environmentalists hoped the era of automotive dominance and suburban sprawl was coming to end, a globalized world that spreads pandemics quickly will push workers back into their cars and out to the hinterlands.

This piece first appeared in the The Washington Post.

Joel Kotkin @joelkotkin, a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, is executive director of the Urban Reform Institute. His forthcoming book is “The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class.”

Where to Obtain Coronavirus Data

Wendell Cox — Thu, 19 Mar 2020 11:38:24 -0400

Various internet sites are now providing up to date information on the coronavirus at the international level. Two sources are described below:

Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering. This site provides a world map, that shows cumulative confirmed cases and active cases (choices available on the map). It is possible to zoom on the map to the state level in the United States, for total confirmed cases, recoveries, deaths and active cases (confirmed cases minus deaths and recoveries). Zooming to the sub-national level is also possible for the provinces (provincial level jurisdictions) of China, the provinces of Canada and the states of Australia.

The map also provides total global confirmed cases (which were 212,000 on March 18), total recoveries (83,000), deaths (8,700).

We ran into some difficulties with the website, with some data not appearing. However, multiple reloading solved the problem (simply clicking on the web address, without leaving the website).

South China Morning Post: Hong Kong’s premier English newspaper provides similar global data in a simpler format than the Johns Hopkins data (the data varies between the two, though not substantially).

The great advantage about these two sites is their consistency of approach and comprehensiveness, which makes it possible to obtain a snapshot of the situation in the geographies that interest virtually any web visitor.

Photograph: Screenshot of Johns Hopkins Covid-19 Global Cases